The Psychology of Politics

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The importance of federal nutrition programs and the people who benefit

It was a weird feeling to be volunteering at a food drive on the same day that President Trump paused funding with the potential to impact key food programs in the country. Someone I was volunteering asked, “what do you make of it?” 

“They just don’t fucking get it,” I said. 

The administration claims that it won’t impact federal nutrition programs, but federal nutrition programs have long been in the crosshairs of republicans as a way to reduce government spending. 

The organization I volunteer with recovers food that would’ve otherwise ended up in a landfill. Perfectly good food like organic blueberries, oranges, apples, frozen tilapia, walnuts, canned salmon and tuna, the list goes on. All this food gets redistributed to people in need. If it were not for We Don’t Waste and other organizations like it, all of these items would end up in the trash, and millions more people would end up hungry. 

At least 50 percent of food in this country ends up in landfills. At least 60 million people are food insecure (a number that I personally believe to be extremely under reported).

The people who attend our food drives are a diverse group. Young and old. Americans and immigrants. Able bodied and not. Every ethnicity under the sun. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents. People wait for hours to receive food. Mothers wait in the heat or the cold holding their children. Grandparents wait to get food for their families while their children work. 

This diverse demographic isn’t unique to this organization. It’s been the same across all the organizations I’ve volunteered with. People of all walks of life are hungry, they are struggling, they need food, the same way WE ALL NEED FOOD. Knowing that they have a place to get food eases the burden of their stress just a slice.

It’s a strange thing to think that these people are just trying to “game” the system. I don’t know about you, but if I go to the grocery store and a line builds up in front of me and there’s no extra cashier in sight, I start to get angry. Why do I have to wait at all just to check out? Open another lane!

Here these people wait in line for hours at times. Trying to find shade from the Colorado sun, or keep warm in the frigid winter temperatures. Just to get some food. Completely unsure of what they might get, because every week it’s different. What’s available is dependent on what’s donated by the local vendors. And that varies from week to week. So I find it hard to believe that if they had the option to go to the grocery store that they would choose to wait here, outside, for an unknown. 

They are also the most grateful people. They are constantly thanking us. One young kid even shook my hand today as a gesture of his appreciation for us being there. They are also the most considerate people. Constantly declining food when they already have enough. 

“O no, I already have plenty of rice.”

“We have a lot of macaroni and cheese already in the house.”

“Take as many apples as you want. Do you want more?” I asked someone today. “No, there are more people in line, leave it for them,” was the reply I got.

This notion that these people are not actually in need. That they are gaming the system. That they are not worthy of the most basic and fundamental resource, is an idea that could only be considered by someone who has never seen it in person. 

It can only be considered by someone who just doesn’t fucking get it. 

Tell your lawmakers to visit a food bank and see if it doesn’t change their mind. Only a cold hearted person wouldn’t.

When Everything is Important, Nothing is Important

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My Biggest Pet Peeve

My biggest pet peeve, especially as it relates to health in this country and around the world is that everyone is working on their own thing, which isn’t necessarily the right thing. My pet peeve was triggered the other day after I read an email for a new documentary called Plastic People. The movie chronicles the rising presence of microplastics in our environment, in our bodies, and its impact on our health as a result.

This is good work. Important work. I agree that our obsession with plastic is definitely playing a role in our deteriorating health. I try to limit the use of plastics in my life all of the time. I just don’t think it’s the most important work if we’re really trying to solve our health problems. 

I don’t know how much time, money, human capital, and just overall resources were used in doing the research for this movie, analyzing the research, publishing it, and pulling a movie together, but all I can think about is that every resource used here, could’ve been used to tackle the real issue. Food.

The fact that most people don’t have access to the food they need to be healthy. Most people don’t have access to enough food at all. The fact that the majority of food is grown in lifeless soil. That most food is doused in chemicals like herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides that kill life all around it. The fact that most animals are raised in inhumane and unsanitary conditions, and are fed the same toxic food we grow for ourselves. That most livestock are injected with hormones and given antibiotics when neither one is needed.

And, most importantly, the fact that all of that food described above is then processed in factories by large corporations who add more chemicals, sugar, and toxic ingredients to it. And that this same highly processed toxic food is convenient and cheap to buy. 

The average American’s diet now consists of at least 70 percent processed food. At least 70 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. At least 50 million Americans are facing food insecurity. Millions more face nutrition insecurity, a term that is not even spoken about. That is the biggest issue we face.

The fact that all of that food is wrapped in plastic, served on plastic, eaten with plastic utensils, doesn’t help. But it is not, in my opinion, our biggest problem. In fact, I would argue, that if we could change our food system, that if we could change people’s behaviors around food, that it would do more to limit the amount of plastic in our environment than anything else we could do.

If more people shopped for and cooked whole foods only, instead of buying packaged foods and pre-made meals. If more people cooked instead of ordering take out or going to the drive in. If less people drank sugar filled coffees, juices, and smoothies. If all of those things were to happen, if we could change the food system and change peoples habits, we could greatly reduce the amount of plastic on this planet.

And that’s why this is my biggest pet peeve. Because when I see a documentary like this one, or I hear a charity asking for money for research to study cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers, or any other chronic disease, or a research study like this one I wrote about, I automatically think, “what would happen if instead of spreading ourselves and our resources thin across all of these ‘issues,’ we aggregated them around the main issue. Food and the food system.”

How much better off would we be?

I’m sure this perspective will garner push back from many. But I think if you truly understand the impact the way we grow food has on the planet, and the way the food we eat impacts our health, you too would realize that there is no greater issue we face than this one. 

Book Review: A Bold Return to Giving a Damn

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

— Niccolo Machiavelli, political theorist

In 2020 the pandemic revealed cracks in our food system and I became interested in learning more about it. In 2021 I leaned in a little more and worked part-time on a farm near Los Angeles. Through my reading and experience I became a believer that fixing the food system was a path to fixing most (if not all) the ailments we face as a nation. November 2022 I listened to Will Harris on the Joe Rogan Experience and the episode provided even more fuel and I started manifesting a trip to visit his farm, White Oak Pastures, to learn more.

In February 2023, Jen and I found ourselves within a 6 hour drive of Bluffton, Georgia where White Oak Pastures is located. By good fortune they were having a Valentines Day dinner at their farm-to-table restaurant connected to their general store. So we made reservations, booked accommodations, and made the 6 hour drive.

Walking into the general store, originally built in the mid-1800s and recently restored, was like going back in time. The whole ambience of being in Bluffton, which resides within one of the poorest counties in the country, just 3 hours south of Atlanta, was a surreal experience. It gave me a glimpse into what rural communities must’ve looked like when local farms and the infrastructure they built could sustain the towns and counties around them.

The food, prepared out of a trailer converted into a kitchen, was beyond expectations. All of the meat and produce served was harvested directly from their organic regenerative farm. There was a stark contrast between their food, and the food we’ve become used to that is grown by industrial methods and fills grocery stores.

But the highlight of the evening was meeting Will Harris. Not only because my girlfriend, who herself is an experienced farmer, and myself view people like Will Harris who are fighting to change the food system as rock stars, but because he was as friendly and down to earth as one could hope for when meeting their heroes. He spent 30 - 40 minutes chatting it up with us around the fire surrounded by his family and friends.

Reading A Bold Return to Giving a Damn on the heels of reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America provided even more insight into the struggles farmers face who are trying to break away from the “conventional” way of farming, i.e. using tons (literally) of pesticides, herbicides and all kinds of “cides” to kill unwanted life off their farms. Wendell Berry published his book in 1977 when Will Harris was just coming of age as a farmer (he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1976).

For farmers the 1970’s were marked by the mantra “Get Big or Get Out,” a phrase coined by President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz. It was part of the administration’s campaign to grow agribusiness and commodity foods. Nearly 50 years later Get Big or Get Out has triumphed at the expense of small family farms and their communities. White Oak Pastures and Bluffton, Georgia were among the casualties. But in the last 25 years, Will Harris has turned that all around.

To give you a little background on what agribusiness and industrial food is, consider the following.

In the industrial food model cattle are separated from their mothers and their milk at 6 month old, and forced into tightly packed feedlots where they’re unable to move or walk. They’re fed commodity grains and corn, crops grown using herbicides, pesticides and other toxic chemicals, which is nothing like the grass these ruminants are used to eating out in the pastures.

The carbohydrate rich food packs weight on quick, and by the time they are ready for slaughter, around 30 - 40 months old, they’re akin to “a twenty year old human weighing four hundred pounds… likely dying of the diseases of obesity and sedentary lifestyle that kill countless humans today.” But their misery doesn’t end there.

A 30 hour ride to the slaughterhouse in a double-decker tractor trailer without food, water, or rest awaits them. Eventually these cattle make their way into your McDonalds hamburger, or grocery store steak.

Would you want to eat a sick animal suffering from many of the diseases that plague humans? Is it a coincidence that humans suffer from the same diseases that the animals we eat face?

The land and climate has also not been spared. It’s estimated that the applications of chemicals and extraction of resources has eroded our soil so drastically that we only have sixty harvests left. As Will Harris puts it, “What I was doing and what my daddy had been doing before me was kind of a one way street: take, take, take from nature, without giving much back.” A trend that hasn’t slowed for the majority of conventional farmers.

Meanwhile large corporations have continued to grow and profit off of this inhumane system. Big Food, the likes of Tyson, Cargill and others, now control over 90 percent of the food we eat. Industrial feedlots supply 97 percent of beef consumed in America (just four corporations control 88 percent of beef processing), and industrial chicken houses supply 99 percent of the eggs and chicken we buy.

And while they’ve been getting rich, rural farmers have been disappearing and getting squeezed for profits. Farmers today make up only 1 percent of the American workforce compared to 41 percent a century ago. And farmers keep only 15 cents on ever dollar of food produced, the remaining 85 cents goes to Big Food and Big Ag.

Before the food system became centralized rural communities enjoyed meaningful livelihoods from raising food and being part of getting food to market. But that small town infrastructure has mostly eroded. All of this degradation and inhumanity is what prompted Will Harris to make a change.

He had been farming according to all of the conventional methods mentioned above. Spraying his land with toxic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Feeding his cattle grains, and giving them antibiotics when the grains inevitably made them sick. And shipping them out to slaughterhouses far away for processing. The farm that was in his family for over a century and the town around him was suffering, and he knew there had to a better way. Twenty five years later and White Oak Pastures is the antithesis of industrial agriculture.

Today White Oak Pastures is a leader in the regenerative agriculture movement, although Will Harris likes to refer to it as “resilient” agriculture. His farm, which raises cattle, chickens, turkeys, hogs, goats, sheep, duck, and guinea hens, as well as organic produce, operates as a “closed loop” ecosystem. The animals are free to roam, graze, root, and most importantly express their instinctive behaviors.

By re-engineering his farm White Oak Pastures runs at almost zero waste. Anything that can be turned into compost and used to support future life is put back into the earth. They’ve also been able to achieve what almost no other farm has, they’re carbon negative. For every pound of beef produced they sequester 3.5 pounds of carbon (compare that to Impossible Burger’s “plant based meat” which emits 3.5 pounds of carbon for every pound produced).

They’ve also been leading the charge by developing internship programs that allow young farmers to come stay on the farm and learn their processes. They’re an open book. In 2021 they launched The Center for Agricultural Resilience with the goal “to educate thought leaders on the environmental, economic and social benefits of building resilient animal, plant and human ecosystems that can nourish our communities.”

But the most amazing part of might just be the impact it has had on the local economy and spirit of Bluffton.

As someone who’s been there, I can tell you that outside of the White Oak Pastures’ general store, there ain’t much else. There’s one “grocery store” although neither you nor I would ever choose to shop there. The closest gas station is 10 miles away. But in returning his farm to the natural ways of growing and producing food, and turning his back on industrial farming, Will Harris and team have been able to revitalize a whole town.

White Oak Pastures now employs close to 200 people, attracting people from all over the country and all backgrounds. Their employees make twice the average pay for the county, and receive benefits such as health insurance.

Local business creates local jobs, which stirs local economy and breaths life into dying towns and cities that were once thriving. Health can never be fully defined, because it encompasses so much. Food, happiness, fulfillment are all ways we try to achieve it. But I’ve recently been learning that none of that matters unless you have community. Community to lean on and support each other is the foundation of a healthy population. It’s whats distinguishes most blue zones from the rest of the world, and it’s what has distinguished White Oak Pastures’ success from so many others.

I loved this book. It’s a story that everyone should know in detail because it tells more than just Will Harris’ story, it tells the story of why our country finds ourselves in the state of decline that we do.

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The podcast episode is a great alternative to the book, as they touch on many of the same topics, just in a lot less detail.

A quick tip from Will Harris about getting to know your food

Ask yourself these three questions about the animals you’re eating:

• Are the animals free to express instinctive behaviors?

• Do they live in their natural habitat?

• How and where do the animals die?